On 5 Nov 2014 at 15:01, Robert Ramey wrote:
It could be concluded that if you formally ask for more, you might get more.
LOL - it could also be concluded that if one can't get something that costs nothing - it's pointless to ask for financial support.
From my observations that isn't how the SC works. It is certainly easier to get money from them than their time. In fact, in recent months they have been remarkably generous with the monies asked of them where they have given more than was asked.
If I were you Robert, I'd make a formal request to the SC for each of the following:
1. Financial support for the running of the Incubator.
2. The hiring of Wordpress consultancy to advise you where you have been having some struggle.
3. The hiring of someone to deeply integrate the Incubator into the Boost website. This could be the consultancy from 2.
4. Begin work on drafting new rules for submitting a new Boost library to default to the Incubator, the old method of going via the wizards is removed.
... and see what happens.
I really appreciate the advice and the good will in offering it. But I have to say I have a whole different way of looking at how the world works.
I'm in a funny position regarding your Incubator. I think the idea fundamentally flawed due to my negative experience some years ago of setting up an almost identical solution for an Economics journal where the membership was a good eight times larger than Boost's and much keener on reviewing, and yet persuading anyone to do reviews of submitted papers was nigh on impossible. I also think that Wordpress is very good at what it does, but anything involving review of other people's work it is truly terrible at. It's just not designed for it, and we ran into numerous scalability problems trying to adapt it to fit peer review. We eventually abandoned the whole project, after yours truly had dumped hundreds of hours of free work into it. Shortly thereafter I decided to press Pause on my Economics career, and return to Technology which I why I suddenly reappeared here in 2012. All that said, my experiences there and my failed Web 2.0 startup in 2011 probably make me unusually familiar with web technologies for a C++ engineer. And I baulk at the complexity of what you are intending to do alone and without substantial financial support. You really need at least three full time engineers on the Incubator if you expect to deliver something usable within six months (don't forget the unit testing! Well designed web services have enormous automated test suites which probe the website in real time for anything going wrong, and they run 24/7. Setting those up properly makes writing comprehensive C++ testing look like a doddle). Good web engineers are perhaps even more rare than good C++ engineers, plus there is 10x more web engineers who think themselves god's gift when they are mediocre at best (more noise to signal). And good web engineers are expensive, Google pays its about 10% more than programmers for good reason, not least the shortage of talent.
2. The hiring of Wordpress consultancy to advise you where you have been having some struggle.
Apologies Robert, I meant to write "hiring of *a* Wordpress consultancy". There are expert consultancy firms for Wordpress just as Boost Consulting of old. The good ones charge about the same hourly rate, too.
Monitoring and managing a wordpress consultancy would probably cost more time than I currently spend on it. Ideally I'd like help from a someone who spends time on this as part of his job. As an aside I'd say that: a) Wordpress, like all web design is a pain. b) Wordpress, like many web design framework delivers huge functionality for relatively few lines of code. Its an excellent learning experience for the hard core C++ programmer. Its a window on where we're missing the boat and how far we can and actually must eventually go. It's an anti-dote to the narrow perspective that we have from sticking to boost/C++/Standard conferences.
Funny you say that actually. Wordpress, compared to the other CMSs, is very distinctly an anti-pattern - it intentionally chooses a simple, inflexible design in exchange for reliability, predictability and security, and it's the only PHP based CMS I know of to have achieved reasonably good security. In that success the anti-pattern was a wise choice, but boy is Wordpress inflexible as a result. If you'd like your eyes opened as to how truly narrow the C++ perspective is, give Plone/Zope a whirl. It's the most secure CMS on the market, and it follows a very C++ style of thinking and design so most C++ engineers find themselves in a very warm and comfortable place ideologically speaking. But you also get that horrible feeling of utter ignorance that anyone starting into C++ gets - Plone/Zope is full of ingenious design patterns, ones which make C++ look fusty and backward, but due to its maturity there are many islands of such design patterns none of which entirely fit together well to the inexperienced. In other words, just like C++, Boost and the STL. One of my reasons behind writing AFIO is for a later graph database library, and why I want one of those as standard for C++ is precisely from what I realised writing against Zope where the only storage available is the reliable distributed object database. Reliable graph database programming is THE future for systems programming languages. Once you wrap your head around being able to assume a reliable data persistence and transfer medium being part of the system, a whole ton of stuff which gets in the way of C++ programming goes permanently away.
c) Actually the incubator has most of the functionality it needs already.
On that we disagree. I don't find the Incubator usable, particularly the commenting feature. I don't think the threaded commenting approach works for code review. A line or file or issue based commenting approach is much better, but even then a decent summary review would be paramount. Some voting and scoring system is needed too.
You can see my thinking in the incubator itself. It's really a seamless facade over disparate repos, issues, docs, etc to make it look like integrated. I leveraged on all the other stuff that's out there - and I can drop any of it in an instant. This is the way of the future. Note I didn't even have to steal or copy anything - I just linked it all. The time is spent on figuring out how to link it together.
Some years ago I converted over nedprod.com, an almost entirely static HTML site like Boost's, to use a large XHTML file as its "database". I have been *very* pleased with the result - it's still technically entirely static HTML, it's just some PHP parses all the static HTML files into a single giant XHTML file and the web front end is some PHP which does a XML query of that giant file, so it reconstitutes the static HTML per page load. Scalability is truly excellent (I used the incremental XML parser). And you can mux in content by having scripts create extra static HTML files for the database generator to assemble. It might be a future for the Boost website. I can supply the PHP machinery on request.
c) The review wizard states that when time is appropriate for a review - not in the middle of release or some other fiasco. There hasn't been a review for a while, and there are worthy candidates in the review queue,
I believe Antony is looking to manage a review soon before his baby arrives.
i) he will select the next library for review giving priority to any libraries which already have the most number of "pre-reviews" in the incubator.
It isn't as easy as that. Review managers need to feel competent in the thing being reviewed. Antony I know is looking at at least three libraries as candidates. When they were added or how long they have waited has no consideration, rather it's whether he thinks they are ready and he is competent in their domain.
I'm sorry I got carried away I work alone and don't have anyone to talk to.
As am I, many days I don't even leave the house as there is nowhere to go where I live (rural, rent is cheaper). Unfortunately reading and writing email is not billable hours, so I lose money doing this :) As you know, I stand pretty much opposite to you on your vision of the future for Boost, I think the time when any of that was sustainable was ten or more years ago. I look at the most successful open source orgs and what they do and we do not, and I think we should copy them. That, as you correctly observed, means Boost turns into a funding acquisition and dispensing machine which actively promotes its vision of the future of C++ by obtaining funding and dispensing funding on the items it thinks will return the most benefits to its future. Very different to before of course, it's more of an open source business than anything involving coding and the skills demanded are managerial and business ones, not engineering. But that's the marketplace right now, we either have to step up to compete or wither in the face of competition. Niall -- ned Productions Limited Consulting http://www.nedproductions.biz/ http://ie.linkedin.com/in/nialldouglas/